A Student of Living Things

by Susan Richards Shreve

  “If this Benjamin does know what happened to Steven, why would he tell you?” I asked.

  “People do strange things.” Victor stood to leave. “In elementary school Benjamin was cruel to the nobodies, guys like me. He’d get people to gang up, and he had a bad temper.”

  I checked the clock over the bar. Six-ten. Milo would be waiting, and I wanted to see him, to rush to the car and climb in the front seat and listen to my uncle whine and complain, jabbering in his familiar way about upright pianos.

  “I have to go now,” I said, slinging my book bag over my shoulder.

  “Don’t worry. There’s plenty of time for you to decide to do something about this or not.” He reached into his pocket to pay. “Make little of what I’ve asked, Claire. It’s just a suggestion, a possibility.”

  I followed him out of the café, far enough behind that I could see the dried mud dropping from his work boots, leaving a trail of dark red dust.

  4

  Milo was waiting at Twenty-first and H, drumming on the steering wheel, when I climbed into the front seat, closed the door and leaned back against the headrest.

  “Fasten your seat belt,” he said.

  I pulled the strap across my chest, sinking into the seat, closing my eyes.

  “Now you’re yellow.” Milo reached across to touch my face. “When I let you off today, you thought you were turning blue, and instead you’ve turned this bronzy yellow, almost golden.”

  “Yellow?” I didn’t open my eyes.

  Milo laughed. “It’s the light from the setting sun falling across your lovely face, turning you yellow. Golden yellow. Very nice.”

  He pulled out of the parking place and turned on H, headed to Twentieth and home.

  “I’m playing Schubert’s Trout. Can you hear it? Just the melody. Dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum. Like that.”

  “I saw you were playing the steering wheel,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t sound as shaky to Milo as it did to me.

  My body gave in to a powerful exhaustion, relieved to be in the closed car, headed home, the sun sinking quickly behind us, relieved to be hidden by the coming dusk so Milo couldn’t examine the color of my face anymore.

  “I’d really like to get a baby grand. The sound is so much better,” Milo was saying. “Or maybe rent one, but it would stick out in the middle of the living room and block the window, so I have found an upright on sale.”

  I was too distracted by my meeting with Victor Duarte for conversation.

  “Did you hear me?”

  I nodded.

  “So I bought it. I bought a Rangely upright, one-third off, and it will fit right in between the windows in the living room next to the couch. You know where I mean?”

  “I think I do.”

  “It should be delivered Friday.”

  I could tell without opening my eyes we were going around Sheridan Circle, the way I was flung against the door. Milo wasn’t good at negotiating circles.

  Every time I drove around Sheridan Circle with Julia on our way downtown, she reminded me that a car bomb had exploded there, killing some important Latin Americans, maybe Chilean, maybe Argentinean—she didn’t know, and she didn’t remember why they were important, but their deaths had to do with the CIA. Although it happened a long time before we even moved to Washington, my mother dealt with all historical disasters as current events.

  “Do you know why the piano was on sale?” Milo was asking.

  “I don’t.”

  “The salesman told me pianos aren’t selling. No one wants music at home. Just the radio and CDs, but nothing that takes up a lot of room like a piano. No one to play the piano, is what the salesman said. Are you listening?”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “This is important. He said to me, this salesman who sold me the Rangely upright, said that it all started with 9/11 and then the war in Iraq, but ever since Steven Frayn died—he didn’t remember Steven’s name, of course, but he said ever since that law student at George Washington University was killed, the city has gotten worse, more and more dangerous, uneasiness everywhere. People are no longer interested in pianos.”

  “Did you tell the piano salesman you’re related to the law student?”

  “I told him nothing at all. My only conversation was about pianos, and when he mentioned Steven, I decided to purchase the piano quickly just to divert his attention.”

  “Good, Milo. We don’t need everyone to know who we are.”

  “But they do know,” Milo said. “It was as if I were transparent and he could see things about me I hadn’t told him—just an ordinary piano salesman with X-ray eyes. When he mentioned Steven, I may have turned bone white, but I promise you I didn’t say a word. And, Claire?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t tell Julia about the piano yet.”

  “I promise I won’t,” I said.

  “I’ll play a lot of Mozart. Cheerful stuff. Your father likes cheerful, and he’ll get used to it, and pretty soon, maybe even weeks from now, the piano will have done its work and your father will be better. I assure you of that. We’ll all be better.”

  “I hope.”

  “Hope is good,” Milo said.

  When we arrived home, the candles were lit, a thick veal stew in a pot in the middle of the table, wine already open. Everyone was sitting around the kitchen table, including Lisha, who ate with us often.

  “You’re late, Milo.” Julia was serving the plates. “If you’re late because you bought a piano, don’t tell David.”

  My father wasn’t at the table. The lights were on in the hangar, and he was working on the left wing of the plane that had been his obsession for the last month. He seldom came to dinner. After we’d eaten, after the dishes were done and we’d all disappeared to our own rooms, me to Steven’s, he would come into the house and finish off what was in the pots my mother had left simmering on the stove for him.

  “I have a migraine and may not be able to make it through dinner,” Julia said, handing Milo a bottle of wine to pass.

  Julia blamed herself.

  “I shouldn’t have had so many opinions,” she said. “That’s where Steven got it.”

  No one disagreed.

  When Steven was young, she had been amused by his strong temperament, proud when people remarked that for a little boy Steven certainly had a lot to say for himself. When his opinions got him attention, especially bad attention, she told Steven that she admired him, admired that he took a position, put himself on the line. “You’re afraid of nothing,” she’d tell him, thrilled to have a “front man” in the house, since my father meandered the paths of theoretical thinking, skirting the difficult decisions. Steven was her kindred spirit.

  “I was wrong,” she’d say. “I should have taught him consequences.”

  I sat down in the seat next to Bernard, keeping myself at a distance. Bernard had developed an odd condition, perhaps of the esophagus, so he seemed to be choking even when he wasn’t eating, an occasional gurgling in his throat as if at any moment something would bubble over.

  “Do you mind stopping that noise, Bernard?” Julia asked, passing him a plate of stew.

  “It’s involuntary, Aunt Julia.”

  Faith laid her hand on Bernard’s arm. “Try, darling,” she said quietly. “I believe you can stop it.”

  “David’s working on the plane,” Milo said, stating the obvious to change the subject. “I saw him when we came in.” He poured wine for himself and for me and passed the bottle around the table.

  “None for me,” Faith said.

  “Then I’m going to drink your share, too,” Milo said, drinking his own glass quickly.

  “Don’t,” Julia said. “There’s too much disorder in this house for anyone to become an alcoholic.”

  “You’re not my mother, Julia,” Milo said, filling his glass to the rim. “A pity, but a fact.”

  “I’m not anybody’s mother any longer,” Julia said, getting up from the table, opening th
e door to the garden, heading to the hangar.

  “She can’t help it,” Bernard said when Julia had left.

  “She can help it,” Faith said. “Poor Lisha. Dinner here can’t be good for you.”

  “We’re all having a hard time,” Lisha said. “I may as well be here having a hard time than at home, where my parents want me to look on the bright side.”

  “What does that mean?” Milo asked.

  “They’re parents. They hate to see me unhappy.”

  “Maybe you’ll meet someone,” Bernard said, and, sensing the silence in the room, he added, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  I waited until I saw my mother leave the hangar to walk around to the front of the house, and then I left the table.

  My father had his back to me when I came in, leaning against the right wing of the plane, one ankle crossed over the other, his left hand in his pocket, staring at something just ahead.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He had moved a couple of plastic chairs into the hangar, and I sat down on one of them.

  “Hello, darling.”

  He had a lovely way of saying “darling,” low in his throat, dropping the g, making a song of the word, as if “darling” were reserved for me alone.

  “How was your first day back?”

  “All right.” I rearranged myself, tucked my legs under me, pulled my jacket closed. The hangar was always cold.

  “I was thinking,” he began, taking a cigarette out of his jacket pocket without lighting it, sitting across from me. “That’s what I was doing when you came in. Thinking I’m not the person I thought I was.”

  “You actually had time to think with Julia here?” I asked.

  “I thought right through her conversation. It’s one of my very few accomplishments.”

  We both laughed. We could still do that together, and I was relieved.

  He had been frozen with sadness. Every movement of his long body seemed final, as if he were in the slow process of disintegrating. He seldom spoke in the company of the whole family.

  This was my first visit to the hangar since Steven had died, and I was surprised to see that in the far corner, the back side of the garden, my father had moved his office from their bedroom. There were his books and his computer, a figure of a naked woman about a foot tall with flexible parts, which his father had given him when he left Wales to come to the United States for medical school.

  He lit the cigarette and looked up at me, giving my foot a gentle kick.

  “You’ve moved your office,” I said.

  “It was too crowded in the bedroom. I couldn’t think, and besides, Milo is looking for a piano to cheer me up. Who needs that additional noise.”

  It was a statement.

  I loved my father’s angular face, the thin, unkempt white hair and long legs, which he crossed at the knee in a European way. “Room temperature” was my mother’s description of his cool restraint, but I could imagine a tempest hidden in the recesses of his brain, virgin passions like mine, a girl in love with dead creatures.

  “You’ve got something on your mind,” he said.

  I was tentative.

  I had come to him about Victor Duarte, but I didn’t know what to ask in order to get the answer I wanted to hear. Not any answer would do and I wanted no questions from him either. What I wanted from my father was permission.

  Something had happened to me with Victor. It was almost a metabolic change, as if I’d been ill for a very long time, sick almost to death, and as I left the Café Rouge, the illness seemed to float out of me. An unexpected burst of energy, an intimation of health.

  What Victor had given me was an enemy. I wanted to believe that Benjamin Reed had killed Steven. A flesh-and-blood enemy, and my desire for revenge was so powerful that I put out of mind a reasonable doubt.

  It’s difficult now for me to understand how I, training to be a scientist with hours of laboratory observations, could possibly have latched so quickly on to Victor’s story, but I’ve learned that in a state of fear I’m capable of anything, including dying.

  “Julia thinks that what Steven wrote in the op-ed piece could have been interpreted as an actual threat to the government,” was how I began my conversation with my father, taking a roundabout route. I wanted to ask him about Steven and the government, particularly the Justice Department, and in a backhanded way about Victor Duarte.

  “Do you think Julia’s right?”

  “That’s her political hysteria,” he said. “The government wouldn’t bother with one young law student writing op-ed pieces. It’s not in the business of killing its citizens, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  He leaned back and stretched his legs, looking out the Plexiglas window of the hangar into darkness.

  “I guess that’s what I’m implying,” I said.

  “This is a democracy, different than the one I grew up with, but a democracy nevertheless,” he said. “In Wales we have an adversary, and that’s England, but we can’t do anything about England except complain. I like knowing the enemy.” He flicked his ashes on the ground and rubbed them into the cement. “I don’t know an enemy here. Except fear. Fear could be it.”

  “I’ve been afraid since Steven died,” I said.

  “I suppose I am, too,” he said. “Sick with it.”

  “I was never afraid until he was killed, and since then I’m frightened all the time,” I said. “Until today. Today I feel a little different.”

  I was hoping he would tell me to trust my own judgment. And if he had asked me at that moment about my meeting with Victor, if he had asked me any questions at all, I might have told him what had happened at Café Rouge and this story as it developed might have been a different one. Or not.

  I know now I was at an intersection, balancing between a permanent and familiar girlhood and something else. A misty state of mind in the process of resolving to a kind of clarity. I doubt that anything my father could have said would have made a difference in what I chose to do. As Faith used to say during family arguments in the kitchen, “choice” is just another word for destiny.

  My father’s computer was open to a medical chat room, and he turned it off, straightened some papers, reached into a cup and handed me a chocolate kiss wrapped in silver paper.

  “Are you working?” I asked.

  “On the airplane,” he said. “Nothing else. I just open the computer so the screen is full.”

  He moved a book away from the edge of his desk, and my eyes followed his hand, not to the book, which was one of his technical science texts, but to a photograph propped up beside it, leaning against a pencil holder full of pencils.

  The photograph was of a young woman I had never seen, with dark hair in a floppy bun piled on the top of her head, high cheekbones, deep hooded black eyes, a dimple on one side of her small mouth.

  “Who is that?”

  He had caught my line of vision. “A girl from my school in Wales.”

  “I’ve never heard you mention her.”

  “Her name was Meryn Thomas.” He squinted, looking at the picture. “I’ve put her photograph up because she’s dead,” he said, as if this explanation made perfect sense. “If that’s what you were wondering.”

  “I wasn’t wondering,” I said, uneasy in such close proximity to my father’s inner life.

  Too quickly, I got up from the chair and crossed the hangar, passing over a shadow of the half-finished airplane cast by the fluorescent light on the dirt floor where I was walking.

  “The girl in the photograph was eighteen, going off to study voice with the Welsh National Opera,” he began as I moved to open the door to the hangar. “And then, in the winter before she left, we were skating on the frozen river Dee, and she died.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “She fell through the ice.”

  I was a small plane’s length away from him, and when I turned around, he had taken the photograph off his
desk and put it in his lap.

  “That was why I left Wales and came here to study medicine,” he said.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  Of course I didn’t know it. He had never told me, and I knew now that he wanted something of me he couldn’t request, sympathy or information or a question about this girl so he could tell me what had happened. It slipped through and out of my mind, then and other times in the months ahead, but I knew I’d heard this story before, or something like it. I didn’t put it together with the boy whose mother died at NIH until much later.

  I suppose I had come to the hangar with something to tell him about Victor, discovering instead that he had his own secret.

  So I turned away and opened the door to the garden without looking back.

  5

  When I glanced through the picture window in the kitchen, Milo was leaning over the table speaking to Bernard, Faith was doing the dishes, and my mother, on her way to the bedroom, her blouse already unbuttoned to change for bed, was saying something in Faith’s ear. Lisha must have left while I was in the hangar.

  Just seeing my family framed by the window, I wanted to disappear.

  I walked out the gate, past our house, past the Denvers’ across the street, their old poodle sitting in the house on the back of the couch barking at nothing, past the Paillons’, their curtains drawn, Madame Paillon in a second-floor window in her robe although it wasn’t even nine o’clock. I hurried past the Hsus, since Dr. Hsu had just opened the front door, saying something quite loud but in Mandarin to his bad tempered German shepherd. Our neighborhood was full of dogs, mostly large ones, and there was supposed to be a leash law, which was observed by the foreign scientists, but the Americans tended to let their dogs run free in spite of complaints. I was leery of Dr. Hsu’s shepherd, since the doctor was too small a man to control a large dog with an agenda, so I hurried up Newland Street, turning left at Fairway.

  It was cold for May, with water in the air thick enough to dampen my face, an English evening, and the freshness of it cleared my mind. I had an odd, disembodied feeling of floating just off the ground, like a seaplane skimming the water, a lightness to my footsteps. No tracks.